


The city that we love

by Written_prose_things



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Gen, Song fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-15
Updated: 2020-05-15
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:27:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24197452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Written_prose_things/pseuds/Written_prose_things
Summary: Years after the war, Katniss, Peeta and the others approach the President to talk about the things that are beginning to happen in the country again.
Kudos: 2





	The city that we love

The lights flicker in the waiting room, casting a yellowish tinge on the walls. It’s very reminiscent of District 13 and it’s underground hallways.

Peeta pats Katniss’ arm comfortingly, he knows she’s on edge about this meeting. He’s old now, even the fancy lights of the Presidential Palace can hide the crow’s feet and lines on his face. She’s old too now. So is everyone else who’s in the room.

Katniss wonders if that is the reason they’ve decided to talk to President Heyward about the pressing matters. She wonders if they would have mounted an attack had they been younger.

She knows that she’s at fault here. The one thing she’d learnt in the war was that the fighting is never over. But she had been the first one to hole up in District 12 and now the government was in the shitter again.

At the same time, Katniss can’t help but feel a little grateful for the timing of the rise of these issues.

Maybe she should be concerned that her children might have to live in a fascist state.

It’s kind of poetic, she knew a broken Panem in her childhood. The last years of her life precede the end of this little safe haven they’d created.

Everyone loves to tell her that with the new medicines she can live for a hundred years before seeing a graveyard. But they also refuse to see the District 12 runt she is. The girl who lived off squirrels for months on end. They also don’t see the teenage rebel she is, the girl who the government tried to kill multiple times.

She knows, even if no one else acknowledges it, that her time is limited if the meeting falls through today, it’s only a matter of who gets her first.

Peeta is more optimistic that her, he thinks they’ll get through to the President. But then, he’s always been a believer.

Katniss slumps back and closes her eyes. She can feel the cloth of her pants stick to her legs, she can sense the people packed around her in the waiting room. Her mind wanders. She remembers the news from the past few years. Miners, factory workers, farmers dying, with no probes. Distinct cases of a lack of government transparency. Small things, especially for them, who’ve lived through government-sponsored genocides. But big enough to signal a change.

Katniss knows, and she suspects that Peeta does too, that these problems aren’t isolated, new or negligible.

She might cover it up, but deep in her heart Katniss is scared. Not of being killed by the President, not even of falling into a state which kills its people, but of meeting the President and realizing that these problems are their faults. Katniss will have to recognise herself as part of the very elite she fought tooth and nail, while those left behind still struggled.

**Author's Note:**

> Just something I wrote in the middle of the night.


End file.
